It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
Never Too Much
67/82 L Memphis Grizzlies 110-131
68/82 W Milwaukee Bucks 125-116 OT
69/82 W Phoenix Suns 123-112
70/82 L Los Angeles Clippers 126-134
I grew up in a sports watching family. March Madness has always been a thing for me. When I was a kid, we watched UConn and any other Big East teams in the tourney year after year. When Villanova shocked Georgetown and Patrick Ewing in 1985, we watched it many times over (for years) since we recorded it on our VCR. This game is probably my origin story, when I first caught a taste of the madness.
In college, watching the tournament was more challenging. This was before streaming and before anyone had a tv in their room. I stood in the basement of the Michigan Union where there was a large screen tv showing games. Others came and went on their way to buy books or cheesy breadsticks from Little Caesar’s, but I stood there before class, during class, after class, getting in some game time when I could.
Once I moved to San Francisco, watching the UConn women meant I had to go the the bar to see their games, nursing my Coke at the local Irish pub in the afternoon, or at an airport sports bar during some sort of comic-con-ish event where people dressed as action heroes drank around me. Of course I watched at work when I was supposed to be working. Later on I just embraced it all and took the days off from work. Why pretend to be someone I’m not when I can be fully me?
March Madness begins for the men today (Friday for the women) and from Thursday-Monday, there will be college basketball games on from 9 am-10 pm. This four day stretch is my favorite holiday by far.
On Saturday and Sunday especially, it’s a time of nonstop good or great or wildly entertaining games where a person can bounce from one second half to the next, choosing whatever is the closest game and occasionally reaching that thing that we love about watching sports - that thing where something impossible or breathtaking happens and we saw it, where there are young men crying tears of joy or tears of defeat and maybe you are tearing up as well because it’s so joyful and tragic and isn’t that what life is like even when all you’ve done is watch basketball for 48 hours because sometimes you make the shot and sometimes you don’t and sometimes you are the person with the towel on your head and sometimes you are the person saying Hi Mom and isn’t that like life, even your life, especially yours, which for sure isn’t a one and done game but feels that way sometimes and wouldn’t it be great to be part of a team when you win and a team when you lose and I do have a team, we just don’t have a uniform and not much of a coach, but it’s a team even though only one of them shares my love of basketball, but that’s ok, on my team we don’t have to like all the same things, we just have to pick each other up when we lose and give each other rides to practice and believe in each other and all of that is a metaphor except for belief because belief is a tangible thing that people do in a hundred thousand large and small ways and we can feel it even when our team is sitting in our separate homes and apartments and we haven’t seen them lately but their belief is a blanket that is always around us, and sports at its best is the both/and of life and life at its best is the both/and of everything and these days, this Thursday - Monday, this stretch of days is a reminder to believe in belief, an opportunity to see and practice that in game-long increments over and over.
I love the first weekend of March Madness.
90% of me is in my super happy place. 10% of me is worried that in the next two weeks I’m gonna blow my resolution to watch all 82 Warriors games. That’s how it happened last year. I watched 80 games and missed two during March Madness. I recorded them and promised myself I’d watch them later, but I saw the scores and I never went back.
It would be a shame to make the same mistake twice. I’m really good at making the same mistake twice.
What I now know about myself is I will only watch Warriors games if I don’t know the score. During March Madness it is much harder to avoid scores because there is a constant crawl of all the scores in every game. I have to figure out how to watch every Warriors game live, regardless of how great the other games are. This is harder than it seems, at least for me. I know these are small problems, or non-problems if you think about it from the “this is about watching basketball, don’t you know this world is rapidly becoming uninhabitable?” perspective. But this is my resolution that I’ve been holding since mid-October and that’s a long time to do something consistently even when it’s something I love. While it’s not the end of the world if I don’t do it, I won’t know what I might learn from actually doing it unless I do it. And I won’t get to try again until next year. All of that is to say that it’s real easy to mess up even by accident in the next two weeks. I mean - what if the wifi goes out?
Shall we talk about the Warriors for a moment? These past four games were on national tv so maybe you watched and maybe you can feel it. The Warriors are finally getting serious. They don’t have all the players they need, but the ones they have are playing with an intensity that feels more like the playoffs, and the vets are leading the way with their much fiercer attitude - Draymond coming back into a game with a bum ankle and a taped up hand, Iguodala rising up for a reverse dunk, Klay getting solid buckets, Looney pulling down rebounds like never before and then there’s Steph, dragging this team to every win he can.
Here’s Steph’s shot that sealed the overtime win against Milwaukee
And here’s the stare
This stare might get them to some road wins. Might get Poole, Kuminga and JaMychel Green to raise their level a bit. Might get them to be who they say they are.
Go Dubs. Go UConn. Go Cinderella teams.
Timeout Books: (the books I read during the timeouts and halftime)
